


Golden Horses

by Valmouth



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Barbara Gordon is Batgirl, Broken Families, Coming of Age, Extended Metaphors, F/M, Freedom, Gen, Gymnastics, Horses, Meditation, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-12 00:19:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7913113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valmouth/pseuds/Valmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she’s ten, she learns to ride a horse. Not the real thing, of course; she’s still a City girl. She learns to ride a pommel horse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Golden Horses

She likes horses.

When she’s three, a friend gives her a pretty picture of a horse in a photoframe. She knows now that the frame was the important part, but back then there were no rules. No social assumptions. No indoctrinated mores.

She’d taken that picture everywhere for four days until she lost it. And she’d cried.

Her dad had brought her another picture of a horse when he came home that evening.

A different one.

And then another.

The first picture had had a mother horse and a baby horse – foal, her mother had corrected – and brushed a kiss distractedly over her red hair. She remembered that distinctly. The second picture had been a white horse in a field of green grass.

She is a City girl through the very core of her.

Doesn’t mean she loves the gum studded pavement or the echoing rattle of the overhead monorail. Even when the monorail is destroyed, the sound never leaves. It’s absorbed so deep into the old stone that new cement echoes it out of street work drills and old car exhausts. The stink of the homeless in the Narrows is as distinct as the chill of the wind whistling through the skyscrapers in the business quarter.

When she’s ten, she learns to ride a horse.

Not the real thing, of course; she’s still a City girl.

She learns to ride a pommel horse.

Learns to jump up. Learns to land neatly astride. Then she learns to stand. Then she learns to walk. And then she learns to run.

Learns to throw her thin, lithe, little-girl body forward and catch her weight on her hands – twist and spin and balance so perfectly that she loses herself in the whip of her legs strong and sure in harmony with her fluid flanks and spine and rigid arms.

There are other forms – other ways – but the horse is her favourite.

When she stays on the ground, she counter balances with her arms.

Her long, strong legs gain muscle.

When she’s ten, her father moves out.

The sounds at home have never been loud. Her mother retreats under pressure. Her father priorities a whole city over them.

She understands.

That’s why a city works. Because no individual is more important than the thousands of other bodies that cram the subway.

She breathes in and breathes out and rides her horses.

Makes pretty ponies in her head while her father carries cardboard boxes out of the house.

“You can call me,” he says, “Anytime. No one is more important than you and your brother.”

She knows but that’s not how a city works.

So she smiles sweetly and hugs him, and doesn’t tell him she tore her pretty picture of the white horse in the green, green grass into so many pieces it’ll never be whole again.

And that’s okay. She reads all about coping mechanisms and grief and anger on the internet. She goes to the public library and gets the relevant books. She sandwiches them with books on pretty horses.

The lady on the desk watches the screen as she scans the barcodes and then hands her the pile but smiles gently.

“Come back if you need more time,” she says, and her kindness is unbearable but that’s supposed to be normal.

She lets her anger ebb and flow as it needs. Breaks her finger trying to punch through a piece of woof in self-defence class. Her sensei shows her how to do it right when she heals. And shows her how to meditate.

And though he says to chant, she makes up pretty pictures in her head instead. Of sun and sky and clouds and rainbows and green, green fields. Breathes in and out to the feel of warmth on her skin. Of wide open spaces. Of freedom.

She thinks of pommel horses, and the swing of her long, strong legs, counter-balanced by her arms, the sinuous fluidity of her flanks and arch of her spine.

Thinks of pommel horses and distracted kisses to her red hair.

When she’s fifteen, her father almost dies.

When she’s sixteen, her mother remarries and her father almost dies again.

She lets her friend pierce the upper cartilage of her right ear and buys a lot of black.

Her mother looks worried and her stepfather is uneasy but she doesn’t say that black is empowering. That it’s classy and timelessness and looks great with her red hair. Doesn’t say that the blue eyes she gets from her mother sparkle when she wears black.

And mostly that she loves it when her mother notices – and she wonders vaguely if her mother even bothers to anymore – and loves it when people second-guess that she’s not some sweet little sixteen year old doll to be batted about by the winds of change. That she _is_ the change.

Black is power.

Black is more than she is.

And she can vanish in it.

When she’s sixteen, an eighteen year old boy on a black bike rapes her best friend, and Angie doesn’t even know that it isn’t her fault.

Babs Gordon does.

And so she smashes her elbow into his solar plexus and then neatly knees him in the groin four times. When he lumbers after her, she thins her lips in the way she knows her mother does and puts her fist to his face hard enough to knock out two teeth.

She still gets the shit kicked out of her.

Montoya gets her out of lockup almost as soon as the desk sergeant figures out just who it is he has in custody, and she’s marched straight to her father’s office at the MCU. Past Bullock and a team of five uniforms trying to restrain two psychotic steroid junkies in clown make-up. Past Captain Sawyer standing in front of a whiteboard with Allen with scene of crime photos pinned up, a mug of coffee in hand.

Everyone in the MCU wears a gun. And she spots eight tasers and three baseball bats and a locked metal cabinet that she knows for a fact has nothing to do with stationary because she overheard her father try to justify it to a figure as dark as night, back in the days when her father lived in the same house.

Perhaps this is why she doesn’t want to listen when her father tells her that violence is never the answer. Never justified.

She says things that night she will always wish she hadn’t. She never finds out if her father feels the same way.

But this is the night she runs into the darkness and pulls back her red hair beneath a black knit cap and arms herself with nothing more than a baseball bat and her long, strong legs and rigid arms and sinuous, fluid flanks. Her spine arches as she throws her thin, lithe body from the edge of one rooftop to another.

She kicks and snarls, and tastes blood that night, and counterbalances her kicks with punches, and another unfortunate girl is a whimpering mess in the corner of diner, all the men bored of all the girls they’ve seen this way and watching a rerun shopping channel on a tiny TV in the corner.

So she throws black coffee into a gangbanger’s face and breaks a plate on his nose. While he’s cursing and spluttering and lumbering around, she grabs the girl and runs.

She gets cursed for her troubles but the girl walks away on her own two feet. Whole and safe. For now.

How much longer, she wonders, before the rope come down.

For both of them.

Before they’re haltered and broken in.

Before they learn to step in line and carry men on their backs.

Before they learn to pull the weight of the world behind them.

She doesn’t want that.

She expects her mother to be awake when she gets home.

Her mother is crying in the kitchen to her stepfather. Her little brother is asleep in her bed, knees to chest, eyes staring inwards to a fear she can’t see, not even if she was there the night Harvey Dent put a gun to his head.

She hugs him and they sleep together in her bed but in the morning, no one says anything.

Her father doesn’t call.

Her mother puts a bowl of cereal in front of her along with black coffee. And her brother can’t look her in the face.

She doesn’t go out again for a week, and when she does, she waits until they’re asleep.

That’s the night that she finds herself hunted across the rooftops by a shape she knows from her childhood.

She ignores it. And does what she does anyway.

She doesn’t hit anyone, though, and maybe that’s her saving grace. She merely observes. Watches. Uses her fresh young breasts and dancer’s thighs to get her into a nightclub she shouldn’t be old enough to know about.

And this is the night she finds him.

He’s younger than she is, and looks older. His eyes are like her brother’s, and he’s all talk and tenderness.

He’s using her.

She knows it.

So she doesn’t mind using him back.

And he grins like no one else as if he knows this.

He’s fifteen, and sucks a hickey into her neck behind the club as they both listen to one of the lieutenants of a minor street gang give up the Riddler’s latest hideout.

Somehow she almost loses track of time as his mouth ghosts over her pulse and he’s good. Very good. Too good.

She feels his hands bunch in her sweater. Feels the hard flatness of his chest against her.

He smells incongruously of nothing.

When she slips out from under his arm, he looks genuinely hurt, and then grins, and leaves. She thinks later she should have known.

She texts her information to the police.

He takes his to a different source.

By eighteen, she’s Batgirl.

She goes out into the streets at night and uses violence as a means to an end. She tries hard because she doesn’t want her father opening that cabinet that has nothing to do with stationary. She tries harder because her brother will never stop looking inwards to a terror she will never fully see.

She will kick and claw and snarl and throw the hardened planes of her body from the edge of one rooftop to the next. She will counterbalance her weight in a knife fight. She will let her anger ebb and flow. And she will save people who have been broken in and haltered, who drag the weight of the world behind them, and she will go home and meditate on sun and sky and clouds and green, green grass.

And sometimes Dick will come to the bedroom of her shared house and crawl in through the window to suck hickeys into her neck and all the way down the arch of her spine.

Dick brings her flowers and ribbon and pieces of technology wrapped in the comics sections of the newspapers because he knows she gets nostalgic for Saturday mornings she never shared with her father.

And he looks up to the printed picture of a horse taped above her desk and tells her that he loves her long, strong legs and her strong arms as much as her soft, sweet breasts and slick, tender inner thighs.

They ride the storms together.

And he will grin with the exuberance of it.

Throws himself into impossible contortions that shouldn’t be possible. Throws himself from impossible heights. Throws himself away.

She knows this.

He is never hers.

Because they’re City kids at heart and they know they don’t matter. Not against the thousands of others who ride the subway.

And if there is one individual who matters, it isn’t them.

But they are young, and the world is corrupt and breathless, and they are on the cusp of greatness and death, wind in their faces, her red hair tangling with his dark strands as they move in unison, muscles bunching and flexing, panting and steaming in the heat.

She closes the curtains tightly sometimes. Locks out the monsters and the city and marinates herself in the warmth of sweat and sex and meditates to the sound of his breathing and images of a horse fleeing across the green, green grass.

She knows the horse won’t escape the shadow of falling twilight.

But for now it’s free.

And that’s all she has.

 


End file.
